The maître d’ sat me next to a table of noisy, overdressed beautiful people; the kind who leave their plastic surgeon’s designer label hanging out of the tucks behind their ears.

Harry Bauer, hero of Blake Banner’s Dead of Night, is an American and an orphan. Somehow his wanderings led him to Britain, where he joined the Special Services. He’s a valued and effective commando, until the night in Afghanistan when he nearly kills a prisoner – an Al Qaida leader who raped, tortured, and murdered an entire village. He gets kicked out of the service, and is soon back home in New York without job prospects.

There is one party willing to hire a guy like him for security work, however, in spite of his hazy military record – a Russian gangster. Harry goes to work for him, but he goes in with a plan – one that will leave a lot of bad guys dead, and Harry considerably richer.

But then he’s detained by some mysterious agents, who escort him to an interview with the head of a secret, international security operation called Cobra. Cobra is not directly sponsored by any government. Its sole purpose is killing – eliminating the worst of the worst, whom the law cannot touch. Harry agrees to join them with little hesitation. Especially because his first target is the same terrorist he had to let go in Afghanistan.

Trouble is, the CIA is holding that monster as an information source, and Harry will have to get through them to get to his target.

Piece of cake.

I occasionally read military action thrillers, but they aren’t my favorite reading fare. But Dead of Night went down real easy with me. I finished it quickly, and had a good time with it. The action never lags, the prose is good (it even made me chuckle occasionally), and Harry comes through as a complex, fully developed character. I hastened to buy the second volume in the series.

I hesitate to recommend this book wholeheartedly, because it’s very bloody, and the body count is high. There’s also the moral question of revenge and whether it’s right to kill just because the victim “needs killing,” so to speak. So the moral ambivalence here is greater than in your average mystery. And, of course there’s always the language and adult themes.

But it sure was a fun read.